A big wave in Barbados left Jake Hamoen quadriplegic. The far smaller one he can manage now is no less powerful.

Jake Hamoen, seen with his wife of 24 years, Toni, was bodysurfing while on vacation in Barbados in May 2012 when an unexpectedly large wave hit him. The impact left him a quadriplegic. Recently, he's begun to be able to move his hands, arms and fingers a little bit.

Three doctors told them Jake was a “complete” quadriplegic who would never feel or move his limbs again.

But now Toni, 59, lifts his right arm off the bed. He wiggles his thumb. He swings his hand back and forth a few millimetres — he calls it the Queen’s wave. He twitches his biceps and triceps. He says there are “twinkles” in his abdomen and thighs when he tries to move them.

He jokes he’s moving from quadriplegic to paraplegic and perhaps, one day, won’t be “any-plegic at all.”

“I’ll lose my status in the system then,” he says with a laugh.

“It’s just been amazing,” says Toni. “It’s one thing we know: you never give up hope.”

Until the accident last May, Jake Hamoen was a youthful 65, a gregarious mechanical engineer who did flips off the diving board, played on a ball team and travelled the world with Toni, his wife of 24 years. Between the two of them they have 11 children and 13 grandchildren. They had two cars and a house in Freelton, northwest of Hamilton, that lit up every Christmas like the Griswolds’ from the Vacation movies.

The Crane Residential Resort in Barbados was one of their favourite places to travel, a luxurious complex on the island’s east coast. The Hamoens arrived on May 5, 2012, with their good friends of 25 years, Doug and Grace Wiebe.

The next day, they swam at shimmering Crane Beach. The others got out before Jake, who was down the beach a little way, bodysurfing 1.2-metre rollers into shore. Then a wave, far larger than the others, came barrelling down on him and struck him.

“And he didn’t stand up; he didn’t come out of it,” says Doug.

Toni remembers Doug started running.

Jake was underwater. He couldn’t move. He held his breath and had a conversation with God.

“I go, ‘That’s interesting, Lord. This can’t be it, because you’d let me say goodbye to Toni. So there must be some purpose to this.’ ”

When Doug got there, Jake was floating face down in more than half a metre of water.

Doug turned him over and pulled him partly out of the water, calling for help. A pediatrician and an Australian firefighter tended to him. Grace sang to him to keep him alert; Toni talked to him.

“He just kept looking at me and saying, ‘Tell the kids I love them,’ ” she says. “I said, ‘Tell them yourself.’ ”

Jake got a message that he had to breathe, or die. He saw a blue triangle that went on and off — no one else saw it — and he breathed in time with it. The tide was coming in and an army of tourists built a sand dam around him. Jake breathed on his own for the 30 minutes it took to get a ventilator down to the beach. It took nearly two hours for the ambulance to come.

Jake says he has always had faith, “but when He hit my head, He increased my faith, many fold.”

A Learjet, with nurses and a doctor on board, arrived in Barbados the next day. By nightfall, the Hamoens were at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. The surgeon who fused Jake’s fractured neck vertebra two days later was on the team that operated on Christopher Reeve.

After the operation, Jake woke up with tubes down his throat. It was then that he decided to start joking. As doctors prepared to do a tracheotomy for the trip from Miami to an intensive care unit in Hamilton, he asked, “OK, where does the Sam Adams go?”

Dr. Michael Fehlings, director of neuroscience at the University of Toronto, said an injury to the spinal cord — the mass of nerves 46 centimetres long that run down the spine and connect the brain and the body — is “one of the most devastating injuries you can have.” Quadriplegia, paralysis and loss of sensation of all four limbs, is particularly difficult because it takes away much of a person’s independence, said Fehlings, a top researcher in the field.

The degree to which someone recovers depends on the severity of injury and paralysis, age and other features detectable on MRI scans. For those classified as “incomplete,” meaning they retain a degree of feeling or movement, there is often “significant recovery,” said Fehlings, adding patients are sometimes mistakenly classified as “complete” when they’re not. For those who are “complete,” the more time passes without improvement, the less there is likely to be, he said. Usually it’s clear within a year how much function a person will regain.

According to a study published in Spinal Cord in 2007, about 80 per cent of those with complete spinal cord injury never recover any movement or feeling. About 10 per cent will regain both some movement and feeling, and another 10 per cent some sensation alone.

These last months have been tough. Toni hasn’t returned to work. She’s sold the house in Freelton and bought one in Cambridge, and had it renovated so it will be accessible. She stays most nights with their son in Toronto to be close; in the past nine months, there have been just six days when she hasn’t spent time with Jake. She has written about their journey on the website CaringBridge. org, where their blog has more than 24,000 views.

“It’s not something the average person can cope with,” says Jake. “Toni is not average.”

Like Jake, she relies on faith.

On Feb. 2, almost nine months after a wave changed everything, Toni thought she saw Jake’s thumb move. The Wiebes popped in for a visit; they saw it, too. And just about every day since, there has been something: a wiggle in a finger, a twinkle in a leg. If Jake could just use his arms, it would be a “game-changer,” he says.

No one knows whether that will happen.

“This is not my plan,” Jake says. “This is His plan.”

And whatever that is, they will figure it out.

Toni smiles. “He’s just amazing,” she says.

He smiles back at her. “I’ve had a lot of help,” he says.

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